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Banksy big in New York

Posted on | October 25, 2013

Every day this month, Banksy has been unveiling new works of art around New York. The works are then announced on his website and posted to Instagram. Many of the surprise exhibits follow his signature street-art style: stencils spray-painted on streets, walls of buildings and under bridges.

Sadly, many of Banksy’s pieces in The Big Apple don’t last long after they are located, either defaced by local graffiti artists who don’t seem to like his popularity, or relocated and preserved to be sold to galleries and collectors by whomever owns the property Banksy happened to choose as his canvas.

Residents of a house that Banksy painted on tried to prevent damage on the art piece by covering it with a large piece of transparent acrylic glass.

New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg suggested Banksy is breaking the law with his guerrilla art exhibits; the statement seems unbelievable given the fact that Banksy is named the most influential street artist of these times.

Peter Gibson aka Roadsworth

Posted on | February 6, 2013

Street Artist ROADSWORTH (born in Toronto) is known from spray-painting bicycle paths onto streets. What people might not know is what seems to be en vogue around the globe at present: Street artists who used to face high fines for their illegal artyfication of streets and walls in the public space, seem to get off with lenient sentences and now do more and more commissioned art work in cities –> i.e. they are hired and paid by different stakeholders (galleries, private investors, etc) and their work is accepted by municipalities.

Over the last decade, Gibson has moved from spray-painting to stencilled street art, his images ranging from bird nests to prehistoric fish and flowers:

Neu Marx: Urban Experience Project #1 by cowsinjackets

Posted on | August 9, 2012

We just completed the first Urban Experience Project in Neu Marx.

Neu Marx is located in the third Viennese district and hosts the Austrian captial’s first media quarter. More than 70 companies have settled in the area, among the Austrian headquarter of T-Mobile, the Campus Vienna Biocenter, the Vienna Film Commission, the University of Applied Sciences Vienna, Seven One Media and Echo Media House.

The problem: People don’t interact with each other.
My immediate sensing revealed: They don’t have any reason to walk through the space due to lack of infrastructure. No supermarket, no bar, no newsstand, only one restaurant that shuts its doors right after lunch.

Task of this Urban Experience Project #1 was to stimulate the discussion among the employees in Neu Marx, invite them to connect on- and offline and tour and discover the space between the beautiful historic brick buildings and new buildings.

Many visits to Neu Marx, an extensive swot analysis and a workshop with the board of the area’s location management agency and the center of Innovation and Technology Vienna fueled into an urban experience strategy created through a collaboration between LHBS, Joanna Bakas and Stefan Erschwendner and cowsinjackets.

I was invited to curate the neighbourhood branding intervention. 17 stations throughout Neu Marx were defined, artists selected, a theme developed. In my function as the project’s curator, I called it ‘language in space’. Why language? Further sensing revealed that the representatives of the 3 industries in Neu Marx ‘media – research – technology’ speak contemporary languages that consist of trends, key data, formulas and technical terminology which create curiosity but also resentment when not understood. ‘sprache im raum’ visualizes some of these signs, codes and day-to-day terminology and aims to stimulate an information exchange to make People meet and talk.